It's been a few months. And as the days decompress and the hours return, my mind's pulling back towards updating, analyzing, writing. I hope to have some great content for you guys over the coming weeks and months, including updates to my reel, game audio discussions and whatever personal reflections I need to put to paper.

In the short term, here's what's new:

It's been a long summer. Back in May, I resumed my work with Microsoft and Team Dakota on Project Spark, which is now nearly out to sea. It'll be on store shelves on October 7th. I'm proud of what we've accomplished, and especially hope that we can keep it in the water long enough to realize everything else we're dreaming of. The game screams potential for awesome, reactive sound at every corner, and it's just about squaring those ambitions up against the realities of development. Lots in store if we can get to it.

The WUIS lays dead (or still) in the water for right now--resuming work at such a brutal pace didn't leave a lot of time for self-improvement outside of it. Now that things are settling, though, it's on me to start filling the time with pursuits outside the routine, doing things worth remembering. That may be a return to Unity jamming, or something else.

There's another thing I wanted to mention before I sign off.

Last year, I participated in Extra-Life, an annual fundraising drive where gamers around the world tap friends, family and loved ones for pledges supporting children's hospitals and cancer research around the world. In tribute, they put themselves through the ringer and ruin their sleep cycle on an unbroken 24 hours of playing games. I broadcast this last year on Twitch.tv, and it was great to have people tune in and keep me going with live donations and support while I slowly lost my mind.

I'm doing another fundraiser this year a few weeks in advance of the main Extra-Life event. Two weekends from now, OCT 4-5, I'll be online for a 24-hour marathon, and am collecting pledges for a special and personal cause: the Ann K. Cresswell Memorial Fund.

Ann was the mother of one of my close friends and a beautiful human being who left us a few weeks ago. She'd battled and triumphed over breast cancer over the past few years. Her sudden departure at the hands of what might've otherwise been a routine sickness is a reminder that our methods for treating cancer ravage the body even as they restore it; moreover, a reminder that life is precious and always rushing by.

Donations to the Cancer Research Institute via the Ann K. Cresswell memorial fund go towards furthering cancer understanding and treatment, that our loved ones may live full and healthy lives outside of the horrible shadow it throws.

Back in action up in Vancouver, the break was great - but a little long towards the end. Scored a lot of portable recording material from household gadgets, cars and city ambiences, saw friends, wore out a welcome or two and got stir-crazy.

Trying to launch into this term organized, so I'm just out-and-out copping Shane's personal backlog in the hopes that I can make it work for me.

For any of you stumbling upon this now or later, looking for information on what you're getting into with VFS' Sound Design for Visual Media program, here are the topics I remember us covering in the last couple of months. If you were hoping to simulate my Term 1 at a library somewhere, you'd want to learn:

VFS Term 1

Much on the physics of sound, with some psychoacoustics (the Fletcher-Munson curve, how we perceive stereo delays) and a bunch of digital audio training (definitions on a bit rate, a sample rate, why we choose the ones we do, the advantages of going higher or lower with each, Nyquist's law, etc.)

Lots of history about the start and rise of sound in motion pictures, how it was once recorded and edited, and more than I wanted to know re: framerate conventions and timecode

How to break out an ADR cue sheet from a film clip; how to set up a ProTools session to record said ADR session later

How to create an EDL (not that the Sound Designer will ever be the one in charge of this); how to stitch together a new production audio track from an EDL you're given, plus the last day's recordings

A solid familiarity with Pro Tools, including: a ton of common editing shortcuts, basic mixing, cut-pasting automation, how several of the most widely used plug-ins (EQ, Reverb) really work and how to set them up to do what your ear is looking for, creating a mix template and custom I/Os from scratch, track and region management, using AudioSuite vs. RTAS plug-ins, creating submixes, working with time code, good session submission practices

Signal flow, bringing the sound you want to record from a microphone all the way through a mixer and a patch bay, into the DAW you're working with

Basic MIDI editing

Basic primer on microphones and mic selection

The one thing I didn't really see stressed in class, but had confirmed, is that these classes won't teach you everything. Seems obvious, but if everyone were aware of it, our labs after-hours would be a lot fuller than they have been.

So as a tip: you want to stay around the labs and just work and work as much as possible. I've had a lot of later-term students come up to me and tell me that Term 1's for taking it easy to avoid burnout, that there'll be plenty of nights to work late once things pick up, but I don't buy it. The class is already starting to stratify a bit, with the real tryhards rising to the top and those who never seem to be around after-hours picking up a reputation for packing up.

I don't think I'm at the top of the class, but I feel like I'm close, and the people I'm sharing that tier with don't seem like competition so much as they are motivation - they make me want to work harder, stay later, spend that tuition money wisely, pick up independent projects on the side, explore avenues that we haven't even covered in class yet and just generally become a badass sound designer far ahead of schedule. I figure, start working this way now so that I'm used to it by the time the program really picks up. It can't hurt, and I'm feeling more fulfilled with my day-to-day than I have in.. maybe ever? Still having trouble believing that this will be my life once I'm through.

From last time, a little update - the music composition part of things is going well. I guess I've approached it before all the other goals because it's the scariest one, the area in which I feel I'm most "behind." Every little melody line, successful bunch of chord changes or head-nod from a fellow student feels like a major victory when I'm coming from no history there besides a bunch of long-faded piano lessons!

And just because no one's finding this site yet, here's a peek at something I did in a night right before I came home for the break. Needs a lot of work, like me revisiting the clusterfuck at the start of the song that were some chord change ideas with the choir that never got properly timed or cleaned up, and I'm not satisfied with the ending, and the drum pattern variation hasn't been done all the way yet, but.. it's something.

Hope we'll get to cover a bunch of mastering processes in the course of the year; it'd be great to take all this MIDI (which is already written) and get the patches it's feeding into really sparkling by the end of my time here. If not, I'll just have to figure it out myself.